Main menu

Secondary menu

You are here

Previously a saw mill engineer, Harker is now an engineer in the Jefferson power plant. He enjoys making sarcastic remarks about Tom Tom Bird, Tomey's Turl Beauchamp, and Flem Snopes. For example, Harker says, "'If Turl ever is unlucky enough to get married he would still have to climb in his own back window or he wouldn't even know what he come after" (24).

Father of Wallstreet Panic (later "Wall") and Admiral Dewey Snopes, Eck seems too generous and good-hearted to be a member of the Snopes family, although he was "another Snopes accreted in from Frenchman's Bend into the vacuum behind the first one" (9) Ratliff explains to Gavin Stevens that Eck is "Indubitably and indefensibily not a Snopes; even to impugn him . . . whose mother, like her incredible sister-by-marriage a generation later, had, must have, as the old bucolic poet said, cast a leglin girth herself before she married whatever Snopes was Eck's titular father" (33).

Father of Eula Varner Snopes, but never really present as a character, Will Varner is nonetheless a major figure in the background of The Town. "Mr Will Varner…just about owned the whole settlement and district called Frenchman's Bend about twenty miles from Jefferson" (5). He rents "a farm so poor and small and already wornout that only the most trifling farmer would undertake it" (5). They rent that farm to Ab Snopes and his family, including Flem. Varner's son, Jody, gives Flem a job as clerk in Varner's store, thus giving Snopes the beginnings of his mercantile and financial education.